[click image]Don't hurt him!
Unlike the kind people at Twitter, the people at my ISP have been unwilling to to postpone an outage to accommodate the need to help save Iran from attack. So this is extremely late to post, and I know I’m already light years behind, but, hey, that’s how Western-style democracies, Western-style economies, “work”!
Experts see no ‘smoking gun’ for Iran election fraud
Andrew Beatty, Agence France-Presse
Published: Wednesday, June 17, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election victory is disbelieved by hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have poured onto Tehran's streets in protest, but experts say hard evidence of vote rigging is elusive.
Since the government handed the incumbent president a landslide win over opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi hours after Friday's vote, Tehran has been convulsed by protests unseen since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Outside Iran, debate over the election result is split down largely political lines.
Former US presidential candidate John McCain, a conservative, has insisted he is "sure" the elections in Iran were rigged. With equal ferocity leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has lambasted "foreign efforts" to discredit an "historic" election.
But with few independent observers on hand to witness the vote, analysts warn there is little evidence of a smoking gun of electoral fraud, or evidence that would affirm a fair vote.
Statisticians, pollsters and Iran experts have been poring over the results for hints of vote-rigging, or the possibility that the controversial president is backed by around 63% of voters.
Ken Ballen, president of the Washington-based Terror Free Future think tank, three weeks ago conducted a rare country-wide poll by phone of 1,001 people to gauge Iranians' voting intentions.
According to Mr. Ballen it is not obvious from that poll that the results of the election were rigged. "At that time Mr. Ahmadinejad was ahead by two to one. Is it plausible that he won the election? Yes."
The survey showed that 34% of Iranians intended to vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. Mousavi was the choice of just 14% of respondents.
But Mr. Ballen cautioned against concluding that the vote was fair.
The poll result fell far short of Mr. Ahmadinejad's margin of victory, and 27% of Iranians surveyed were still undecided at the time the survey was taken. "Anything could have changed," Mr. Ballen said.
Mr. Mousavi supporters point to the amazingly quick tallying of millions of hand-counted ballots and the Mr. Ahmadinejad's surprise win in Mr. Mousavi's home town, Tabriz, as proof positive of foul play.
Mr. Mousavi is from Iran's Azeri minority, so voters in his native region in East Azerbaijan province were expected to back him to the hilt, according to Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
Instead official results showed Mr. Ahmadinejad won the town and Mr. Mousavi's tally across the province was a modest 42%.
But Mr. Ballen's poll indicated only 16% of Azeri Iranians would vote for Mr. Mousavi, against 31% of Azeris who claimed they would vote for Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Walter Mebane, a University of Michigan professor, has been examining the election results using statistical and computational tools to detect fraud, a method he describes as "election forensics."
Comparing 366 district results with those from the 2005 elections, Mr. Mebane concluded that the "substantial core" of local results were in line with the basic statistical trends.
"In 2009 Mr. Ahmadinejad tended to do best in towns where his support in 2005 was highest, and he tended to do worst in towns were turnout surged the most."
But Mr. Mebane said data released by the Iranian authorities was not detailed enough to say whether the vote was rigged or not.
"The vote counts I see recorded here do connect to reality to some extent, but in no way do I think that any of this analysis rules out the possibility of manipulation," he told AFP.
Mr. Mebane pointed out that trends would still ring true if the government simply inflated Mr. Ahmadinejad's vote by a fixed percentage, perhaps offsetting it against deflated opposition tallies.
With half a million people on the streets, proof of such a falsification could spell the difference between a call for justice and a revolution, according to Mr. Alfoneh.
"If the system totally fails to provide documentation that this is not fraud, that is something that is going to radicalize the protesters," Mr. Alfoneh said.
I'm bothering to set this out here, despite its being weighted still in favor of stoking a revolution if the current regime can't end up proving a negative, because at least the guy is reaffirming that the landslide victory was in line with the statistics and base of knowledge we have about Iranian politics and demographics.
The beloved friend who sent me the image of my dream man, above, I think did so in the effort to convince me it isn't just the young and stupid involved in this hype-the-U.S.-media movement in the streets of Tehran. Of course not. It is a very large showing of the minority of relatively prosperous, educated and cosmopolitan Iranians who are fed up with the theocracy holding them down. It is mostly their children whose associations have been infiltrated and propagandized, and whipped up with this deadly Obamanian internet agitprop, but adults who wish for the future of the youth in general, and certainly parents and grandparents who didn't particularly have knowledge of or care about Mousavi's brutalization and murder of leftists when he was prime minister are also throwing in here.
The weirdest part, even though I understand it, is that the MEK, the leftist group that tried to fight the theocracy in the Revolution, and whose members were killed in their thousands, with weapons from the neocons in the Reagan camp, have now joined with the neocons to accomplish their shared ends. The MEK was long considered a terrorist group by Iran and France and most of the world... even though they were fighting for the downfall of the theocrats we seem so uniformly to revile... even if in some exalted quarters it is
ONLY because they preside over
OUR oil. Somewhere in the middle of last night's link blitz is mention of our funding this group, and other terrorist groups avidly terrorizing away inside Iran as we speak.
I think my “green revolution” friends are feeling bruised by my assertions. Truly, how could they help but feel insulted that I seem to think they are spoiled children and spoiled elites, who are heedless of the dangers of rapprochement with American and Israeli interests, and of the rights and well-being of nearly two-thirds of their countrymen. That has to sting. I am sorry for it, because it is not my intent to sting people I adore, but truth has different levels of consequence, and being blinded by allegiance to it on one level can cause people to miss it on the level where their own lives, the lives of us all, are literally at stake.
It looks as though maybe the snake Rafsanjani has thrown in with our covert efforts for regime change in Iran, for the same reasons as the leftist MEK has; to wit:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And it seems to me that the discomfiture of the relatively privileged has been very successfully stoked by our agents, with the help of this extremely wealthy oligarch and the help of the outraged leftists and the help of the students from the relatively affluent sectors of the cities who hit the Obamanian internet and street agitprop gig with all the considerable strength of both body and not-fully-opened mind they can muster. This appalls me for so many reasons, but chief among them is that all these people -- the one fighting for more wealth and power; the ones fighting not to win but to make their enemies lose; and the ones who simply want to be shut of the bumpkin religious strictures -- are actually fighting for cutting off aid to the defenders against Israel’s perfidies, and for Western corporate control of their resources.
They don’t see, or don’t care, that there is literally no chance this could be pulled off without a war, even if their schemes to get there through Mousavi’s election had worked. They don’t see, or don’t care, how their success, even if it mystically could be pulled off without a murderous conflagration, and it can’t, not yet, how this would leave millions and millions of Iranians completely destitute or in drastically reduced circumstances. They don’t see, or don’t care, how this would create another puppet regime as repressive as the Shah’s. They don’t see, or don’t care, that they have already done way too much to help the American sheeple consent to an attack on Iran. They are all -- those of them not in the pay of the U.S. Government, that is -- looking at their own hallucinations of the superiority of Western “civilization” and their own resentments and their own ideals and their own ease... which is just exactly what the agitators in our pay were sent in to stoke, to whip into this frenzy playing out now.
I only hope they all lose heart for it, not because I don’t wish them mostly what they wish for themselves, but because I wish for them to
LIVE and for the Western oligarchs and Zionists who would slaughter them to be stopped.
No. Really. My motto around here has been from the inception of this infernal record of samsara has been, “TRY REVOLUTION” and I ain’t kidding, but sheesh, don’t you think you could try the revolution you already had just a little bit longer? Don’t you think the promotion of more moderate clerics and the demotion of the more greedy and dictatorial ones might serve the cause of a healthy and happy and
whole society a little better than succumbing to the fires of delusion lit by the slash and burn farmers of global domination?
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